Issac John - Reboot: How to Manage Career Breaks and Return with Greater Success

For Dad and Viggy

Its what you do in the dark, that puts you in the light.

(Under Armour/Droga5)

Contents

Bangalore, 15 June 2017

I ts a Monday but I have taken the day off. Taking the day off, my wife tells me, is a tad extravagant.

At 12.30 p.m., Netflixs Head of Marketing for Asia-Pacific (APAC), Jerret West, will be speaking with me for fifteen minutes. He wrote last week to update me, as he said in the email, about the developments on my candidature for the position of Director, Marketing at Netflix India. Its a role any marketing professional wouldve given an arm and a leg for in those days, or perhaps even today. Netflix, a Wall Street favourite and the poster child of worldwide streaming, had launched in India in early 2016 and since then Id set my sights on a position in that company. After eighteen months of working towards it, I was finally closing in.

Since they were new to India, theyd need a marketing head soon. I had reasoned this back in 2016 and had dropped my CV on multiple job portals and written to various people within Netflix to explore the possibility. Initially, the responses were of the polite Were not looking for marketing yet kinds, but then in February 2017, the role of Head of Marketing showed up on their career section, and I formally applied for the position.

The prognosis was positive. Since February, Id gone through four telephonic and five in-person interviews at Netflix. I was so keen to join them that even without being asked, I had presented to them an entire three-year growth and marketing plan, detailing the revenue and subscriber trajectory till 2023.

I wanted to show them I was a cut above the rest. I had made a ten-slide deck that Id presented to them on Zoom (way before Zoom occupied our days the way it does today) on their go-to-market strategy for India. They then flew me to Singapore to meet their APAC management top brass. When I met the in-person interviewers separately at their office in Singapore, each of them appreciated the deck. A couple of them even asked me to share it with them via email post our interview. That was in April; since then, things had gone quiet.

After chasing them a few times over the last couple of weeks, I finally heard from Jerret West that they were ready with an update on my candidature. It was a bit unusual. Typically, the decision on whether a candidate has finally made it or not is communicated by HR, and Jerret was the person I was supposed to report to. Why would he want to give me an update?

I was getting paranoid because this call could mean the difference between me having bounced back from my career break and me sinking into an abyss. I needed the day to absorb the significance of the outcome of this call.

At 12.30 on the dot, Jerrets number flashed on my phone.

Hey Issac, how are you doing? Apologies for taking all this time to get back to you. You have been very patient with us.

My mind raced. It can only be a good sign, I thought, that this senior professional, whom I couldnt wait to start working with, starts this call on such a cordial note. I had spoken to Jerret twice before and we had a good equation, but as I had come to know by then, companies like Netflix didnt depend on just the immediate supervisors feedback to make a decision.

Jerret continued. Issac, I know how much this job means to you. Your passion in speaking for Netflix across these few months has been unparalleled.

I was quite sure he said this because of that ten-slide deck that everyone in Netflix had appreciated. But the question swirling in my head was whether it was good enough to get me over the line.

His next few sentences would upend my life.

Its hard for me to say this, knowing the great feedback most of my peers had for you, but at this stage for our business in India, we just require someone who has some more entertainment marketing experience than you do and hence, we wouldnt be taking your candidature forward for this position. Normally, we would have our HR team connect with you, but the reason I am making this call is that I wanted you to know you were very close to what we were looking for, and I personally wanted to thank you for your efforts in making this work.

I thanked Jerret for taking the time to speak to me and put down the phone with the heaviest heart I had experienced in a long time. It felt like a thousand bees had stung me on my face and in my guts at the same time.

It was over, and I was now thinking about what to do with the rest of the day. My wife was right. I didnt need a whole day for this.

A Professional and Personal Abyss

J une 2017 wasnt exactly turning out to be a fairytale. The reason why that Netflix phone call seemed like an abyss for me was because it was just a week ago that both Airbnb and Uber had said no to me within days of each other. Like Netflix, for Airbnb and Uber too, I had lost out in the final rounds. Tech companies keep multiple rounds spread over months, so each of these rejections was a real hard knock. That fifteen-minute call Jerret had placed on my calendar for that afternoon meant everything for my career for the next five to ten years.

By June 2017, it had also been nearly two years since I had taken a voluntary sabbatical by giving up my Head of Marketing role at PUMA India. I had started my sabbatical in August 2015 with the goal of learning the craft of screenwriting and then writing and getting a film made. The sabbatical, which lasted a year and a half, saw me finish a three-month writing course in New York that enabled me to write three screenplays and two manuscripts over these eighteen-odd months. But none of these were on course to seeing the light of day in the form of a movie or a book. With nothing else working out, in January 2017, I resumed my mainstream corporate career, working with a health-tech startup called HealthifyMe.

During the writing sabbatical, my modus operandi was to write a full-length screenplay every couple of months and then plonk myself in an Airbnb in Andheri and pitch to talent agencies and directors and producers in Mumbai. When that led nowhere, I started a novel. It took me another couple of months, but after it was finished, I wasnt happy with it.

I then started writing material for stand-up comedy and performed at open mics at obscure venues around Bangalore and Mumbai. As much as I loved stand-up comedy, I felt I wasnt suited for it. As a last-ditch attempt, I started writing short stories and pitched those to various publishers and literary agents. And yet, even after much effort, I couldnt make any meaningful breakthrough on the writing front.

During my sabbatical, I additionally consulted a couple of companies and turned a columnist, but none of that made me feel like I was getting back on my feet. With the idea of trying everything possible, I even turned Uber driver for a week. I saw it as an opportunity to network by opening up exploratory conversations with senior people in companies who would be taking Ubers in traffic-stricken Bangalore. This was inspired by my time in New York and Austin, where I had seen extremely qualified working professionals driving Ubers at night and striking conversations with passengers. I was hustling day in and day out to get to an end game and would entertain any conversation, direct or tangential, in the interest of rejoining the corporate sector at a level that was commensurate with my years of experience.

Alongside, Id also applied for the position of Head of Marketing at several consumer brands. Those didnt work out either. In the end, it was one of those peripheral conversations that actually led to my job at HealthifyMe. However, while the co-founders at HealthifyMe, Tushar and Sachin, were very supportive of me, and I had a hard-working team, I somehow didnt feel Id found my niche. I was thirty-four then and had every reason to believe I had blown up what was a fast-rising career.